Celtic Fans Aren’t Interested In Whether Arrogant English Shock-Jocks Are Happy Or Not.

It’s not often that I agree with Tom English, but he’s one of a number of pundits today who has scorned Danny Murphy and his comments on the last Glasgow derby.

Apparently, Murphy turned it off after realising there were no away fans in the ground. He’s woefully behind the news if he didn’t know that, and I find it hard to believe either way.

The thing is, no Celtic fan gives a damn whether Danny Murphy watched that game or not, and I am baffled as to why the media thinks any of us do. This is not news. This is gossip.

This is the kind of crap our media seems obsessed with.

Murphy is a third-rate English pundit sneering at the game up here, and really that’s all this was, that and someone who hasn’t been in the news for a while wanting to see his name in the headlines again.

Our media does not have to indulge rubbish like this, but they do.

What Murphy is saying is that there’s no other reason to watch our biggest game than the sheer hatred which used to surround it. Let me tell you, I do not miss that element of it.

I’ve switched off a lot of games in the last few years, most of them, it has to be said, in the English Premier League, and I write that as a genuine football fan who watches games from all over the world. At no time switching one off have I ever cared who was sitting in the stands, or felt the need to call a press conference to inform people of the fact.

Is the derby experience lessened without away supporters?

I am split on that one because I genuinely detest having them in our house, polluting it with their bigotry and bile. The atmosphere around these games is horrible and I don’t think anything which reduces that can necessarily be called a bad thing. But I respect the views of those who do think the fixture is less than it was without it, and to a certain extent I can’t disagree.

But to brand the fixture “unwatchable” as Murphy has done or – even more ridiculous – to demand sanctions as Simon Jordan has done is patently ludicrous.

Neither of these guys ever has a good thing to say about Scottish football.

The Evening Times and other outlets are running this stuff tonight as if we’re talking about two elder statesmen of football here who are genuinely concerned about what is happening to what they see, mistakenly, as one of the great derbies.

But these two are mouthy EPL-centric goons who couldn’t give a toss about the game up here, and are only interested in sounding off.

The day we listen to Simon Jordan, who drove the club he once owned to the wall will be a cold one in Hell. Would BBC Radio Scotland put Craig Whyte on? That’s the kind of guy we’re talking about.

Jordan does make one good point; this should never have been allowed to get this far, and the SFA and the SPFL’s failure to involve themselves in it before now shows a spectacular failure of football governance.

But as per usual, this ignorant eejit cannot bring himself to apportion the blame where it actually belongs, and lumps us in with the Ibrox club as though this whole thing were our fault.

His proposed “solution” – to return to the previous allocations – is Celtic’s official policy, as stated on more than one occasion, and it is incredible that he either does not know that or chooses to misrepresent us in this fashion.

The media shouldn’t be giving this stuff the time of day.

I would prefer not to have to write about it myself, but I only do so to question why our outlets up here even give a damn what those two mouthy Englishmen think.

Does it enhance our game in any way to have their input? No, it makes Scottish football look ridiculous to their audiences, and whilst I don’t disagree that we have major problems up here, I have more respect for it than that.

Some in the media will doubtless say that the point is to pressure the two clubs into seeing sense; that’s part of the problem, of course, in that there is only one club responsible for this, and that we would be perfectly happy to go back to how things were.

The real issue I have with this idea that the clubs can be shamed into a solution fails to consider that Celtic have nothing to be ashamed about and Ibrox literally cannot be shamed.

But you have to pay attention to this subject to know that stuff, and you only pay attention if you actually care about the issue and these two don’t. All the press up here does is give megaphones to those who think we’re a backward joke, and that has knock-on impacts in every area from sponsorship to the image of our game abroad.

Why our hacks continue to publicise anti-Scottish garbage like this I’ll never know.